The abyss had been silent. Lucien filled it with the subtle, deep hum of existential truth. He wasn't shouting; he was merely defining the parameters of Ethan's despair.
"Live again? As what? Your weapon?" Ethan's voice cracked, raw with a futile resistance. He felt the cold pressure of the void tightening around him, a reminder that the void didn't need his permission to keep him.
Lucien smiled, an elegant, bloodless expression devoid of warmth. "A weapon, yes. And a shield. Heaven has grown fat on its self-proclaimed purity, casting judgment without context. They wanted your selflessness gone. They wanted your soul, the one that dared to sacrifice itself rendered inert." He gestured, and a red echo of the burning car coalesced in the void, frozen mid-collapse. "Your sacrifice was a miracle, but to the architects of the Divine, miracles must be authorized. You acted outside their jurisdiction, Vale. That makes you tainted."
Ethan stared at the floating illusion of his death. "I saved a life."
"And for that, you were condemned. I offer you a chance to serve a higher justice—one that judges sin, not circumstance. You will be my Emissary of Hell. Your task is simple: to hunt those souls who have escaped my jurisdiction and silence the unauthorized miracles that destabilize the balance." Lucien leaned closer, his voice a seductive whisper. "You see the sins of man, yes? The red echoes? You already possess the sight of a judge. I merely offer you the tools to enforce the verdict."
This wasn't the standard devil's contract he'd read about: no demands for his soul, no promise of earthly riches. The price was something worse: servitude of purpose.
"And the cost?" Ethan asked, dread a freezing knot in his solar plexus.
"The cost is contained within the mark itself," Lucien announced, raising a slender, pale hand toward Ethan's chest. "Every time you use the power I grant, every soul you capture, every miracle you suppress, Hell takes a little more of the man you were. You draw your strength from the Circles, Ethan. You will gain power by absorbing sin. And sin is addictive. Use the fire, and the fire uses you."
To be saved is to become the thing I hate.
Lucien waited, patient as a mountain.
He didn't need to compel Ethan. The memory of the crushing silence, the perfect, desolate nothing of the void, was coercion enough. The thought of returning to that sterile, eternal processing chamber a place where a good act was met with damnation was intolerable. If he had to become a monster to feel human again, he would do it.
"I accept," Ethan forced out. "But I serve my own justice. The girl Seraphina she lives. I will not be ordered to harm the innocent."
Lucien laughed, a dry, melodic sound. "Fair enough. A judge must have boundaries. It makes the sentencing more satisfying." He closed the distance between them. "Now, the penmanship."
His fingers were icy cold, but the moment they touched Ethan's chest, a bolt of annihilating heat ten thousand times worse than the fire that had killed him tore through his phantom body. It was a searing, foundational pain that felt like the very definition of his identity was being rewritten with a chisel of white-hot spiritual energy.
Ethan tried to scream, but the sound was trapped, turned inward.
Lucien was carving. He didn't use a knife; his touch was the tool. The sigil manifested as a geometric pattern of overlapping flame and chains: the chains of Penance for future souls, and the fire of Wrath for his own.
As the infernal calligraphy deepened, Ethan felt an infusion of power a roaring, angry energy that settled in his bones and made his phantom heart, which shouldn't have been beating, hammer against his ribs. He felt the knowledge of the Wrath Circle, its destructive power, its righteous fury, its terrible risk flow into him.
When the pain finally receded, the sigil was complete. It wasn't ink or a scar; it was a permanent, glowing brand etched into the very core of his being. It was the mark of the Emissary.
Lucien stepped back, admiring his work. "The mark will flare when great sin is near, guiding you to targets. It is your tether to me, and your prison. Do not attempt to remove it."
He didn't wait for a reply. He simply raised his hand, and the abyss itself began to convulse.
"Your mission begins now, Emissary. Find my escaped souls. Balance the scales."
Before Ethan could formulate a question Where am I going? How do I get back? Lucien uttered a single word in a tongue that sounded like grinding tectonic plates: "Gatewalk."
The world tore.
It wasn't a teleportation; it was a violent expulsion. Ethan felt himself being dragged through layers of impossibly hostile reality. He saw flashes of the other Circles: vast, empty libraries (Limbo); endless, shifting sands (Gluttony); and oceans of solidified, coppery blood (Violence). The journey was brief, brutal, and terrifying a spiritual punch that collapsed time and distance.
He slammed into existence with the force of a falling anvil.
He gasped, a deep, rattling intake of mortal air, and then coughed not from smoke, but from the spiritual residue of the journey. The first thing he registered was the smell: wet asphalt, exhaust fumes, and a distant, clean scent of rain.
He opened his eyes to see the blinding glare of a weak morning sun filtering through the canopy of an oak tree. He was lying in the overgrown, weedy corner of a dilapidated park.
He was back. He was alive.
Or rather, he was merely animated. He scrambled to his feet, checking his pulse instinctively. Nothing. No steady rhythm, no gentle thump of blood flow. Yet he breathed, he felt the cool air on his face, and his muscles responded. He was a perfect imitation of life, sustained by the furnace in his chest.
He reached under his shirt. The sigil was cool to the touch now, a deep, black-red, star-shaped scar that pulsed beneath his skin. He was wearing the same paramedic uniform he'd died in now singed and shredded, but somehow intact.
He looked around. A world of colour and life, utterly indifferent to the abyss he had just left. A jogger passed by, headphones on, oblivious to the fact that Hell's newest weapon was standing five feet away, smelling faintly of sulfur and ozone.
Ethan Vale, the man who died to save a child, was gone.
In his place stood something cold, something burning, and something utterly, terrifyingly alone. He put a hand over the sigil, feeling the terrible power thrum beneath his palm. He had a pulse of fire now, and a purpose forged in the abyss.
He had to find out what sin he was paying for and if the price was worth the life he had stolen back.